Like Everything in Life, SEO – Search Engine Optimization has also evolved over time. Search Engines are becoming smarter and smarter at figuring out who is worthy to be on their first page and who deserves to be penalized in their rankings.

Keyword Domains – In the early ’00, to rank highly on Search Engines, all you needed was a decent Domain name. As long your target keyword was in the domain name, you would most likely be on the first page of the Search Engines. Example: If you are a plumber and you bought the  domain name www.cheapplumbers.com, this would be a good indicator to show that you’re in the plumbing Business.

Backlinks – As the years progressed, the importance the number of links coming into a website became an important factor in ranking ones website. In the eyes of the Search Engines, the most people had a link backing back to your site, the more these others valued your content.

Anchor Text – Though the number of backlinks coming into a website was important, the anchor text was attached to the hyperlinks became very important. Even though a large portion would be “click here”, the search engines wanted a wider range of anchor text. Also, the most backlink coming in, the better it was for your website.

High PR Backlink – This is when Google started dominating the world of SEO. They concluded that not all backlinks can be treated equally. An algorithm was devised to classify every single website with a score from 0 to 10. A OR (PageRank) of zero would be given if you had just kicked off your website or it hasn’t yet indexed in Google. Obviously, the higher the PageRank, the more authority your site had. PageRanks of 9 and 10 were reversed for such pages as Google, Apple, CNN, Yahoo, Microsoft and Adobe to name a few. Your ranking would work in your favour if you had a backlinks coming from a high PR website.

Domain Authority – Similar concept to Page Rank; backlinks would be the ‘link juice’ coming in from high authority domains – ie. another website that is regularly updated with fresh daily content that is also had a large amount of daily visitors. The domains authority is updated more frequently than PR and is ‘governed by Moz.com. The rating are on a scale of 0-100.

If you had a Press Release, Article or a News publication hosted from a high authority website, this would work wonders for your rankings. In Googles eyes, if a High Authority website is mentioning your site, then you give a boost too.

Web 2.0 – Currently we are sitting on the Social Media forefront of SEO. If your website is being talked about on such site as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and LinkedIn, Google considers your site and content to be fresh. Also, the content is interesting enough to enable the wider community to be discussing your topics on their personal profiles. The ‘link juice’ that comes from these websites today are one of the most powerful indicators to improve your search engine rankings.

This also includes the use of Video content. As most web surfers would rather watch a video than read and article, the use of video (YouTube to name one) embedded to your article with appropriate meta tags, headline and description correctly updated, this definitely give helps improve your rankings.

Conclusions – As with any evolution journey, I’m sure there’ll be more chapters in the future concerning SEO. Building fresh new content that is talked about by many users around the internet will alway play a key part in assisting with your rankings. Be sure though to not become complacent as Google; the current dominant player can make alterations to their algorithm any time.  They’re not in the game of penalizing legitimate relevant website that’s been built the correct way. Make sure you play the game right thinking long term and you can’t loose.

To Your Success,

Vertex Team